Wafer inspection systems are often used to analyze wafers to determine the presence of defects on a wafer. Many wafer inspection systems detect defects using dark field optical systems in which illumination is scattered from defect sites. A drive to detect increasingly smaller defects generates challenges to current detection systems. A first challenge is that the strength of scattered illumination scales as the sixth power of the radius of the scattering object. Thus, decreasing the radius of a scattering object by a factor of two results in a decrease in the strength of scattered illumination by a factor of 64. A second challenge is that that wafer surface roughness and scattering from air molecules (e.g. N2, O2, CO2, and the like), generates a background signal that limits the size of detectable defects. A third challenge is that technological hurdles may limit the ability to scale the wavelength of an illumination source to lower wavelengths in order to increase scattering strength. Therefore, there exists a critical need to develop systems and methods to detect small particles in wafer inspection systems.